Influencers and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia

Timely and essential intervention. Under the framework of aspiration, authenticity, and advocacy, this collection cuts through the noise to untangle the complex relationship between influencers and gender politics in one of the world's most wired regions. Bridging digital media and gender studies, it delivers insight that is both empirically rich and conceptually sound. Indispensable reading for anyone seeking to understand identity, power, and resistance in the digital age.

Professor Merlyna Lim, Professor of Communication & Media Studies, Carleton University

Incisive, timely, and theoretically generative, this book shows why and how Southeast Asia is indispensable to understanding the global gendered politics of digital culture today. With richly grounded case studies and sharp conceptual interventions that unpack the intricate ways in which influencers reshape gender, aspiration, and public culture, this volume will be essential reading for scholars, students, and the general reader who are interested in digital media, global gender and sexual discourses, and contemporary Asia.

Assistant Professor Jamie J. Zhao, global queer media scholar and Assistant Prof. in the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong

Influencers and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia offers a sharp, nuanced, and intellectually ambitious account of how influencers negotiate, reinforce, and disrupt gender norms across one of the most diverse and dynamic regions in the world, a region whose cultures are inseparable from the layered legacies of colonial and postcolonial modernities. Bringing together a rich range of perspectives, the volume illuminates how influencer culture intersects with, and at times disrupts, the gendered structures of everyday life, from kinship and religion to state governance. In doing so, it boldly challenges received assumptions about gender and digital life in Southeast Asia, while offering frameworks and insights that will resonate far beyond the region. This is essential reading for scholars of digital media, gender studies, and Asian societies alike.
Assistant Professor Eva Cheuk Yin Li, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Screen Industries, Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London

This excellent, pioneering anthology highlights the contradictory ways influencers can both endorse and challenge cultural constructions of gender, using the diverse context of the Southeast Asian region. From the Thai women in the military whose posts endorse a militarized femininity, to an Indonesian thrift fashion influencer whose photographs are taken in a narrow alleyway—a designated male space and thus quite a radical act, this important book introduces us to individuals who have succeeded in politicising the everyday in gender advocacy, demonstrating the many subtle and subliminal possibilities for participating in public discourses about gender issues. Finally, it invites scholars to investigate how actors who may not consider themselves to be feminists or gender activists, initiate public performances that engage with hegemonic discourses in ways that have the potential to transform them.

Professor Mina Roces, Professor of History, School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales

This collection is a remarkable and important contribution to the discussion of gender, class, and race politics in the Southeast Asia's influencer landscape. It offers rich empirical research on an impressive range of contexts —from ethnic minority women TikTok creators in Vietnam’s highlands to young women activists in Bali. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand digital cultures and power in the region.

Associate Professor Ee Ling Quah, Western Sydney University

The book successfully and creatively shows how influencers can promote and reinforce dominant orientations in gender domains, as well as create possibilities for contestation.
Professor Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore